On walkabout in life and technology

Minimal Project Management - 6 Months Later

Aug28th, 201612:53 pm

Just short of six months ago, I wrote about how I was transitioning to Minimal Project Management as my team was growing at work. So, how did it go? Did it work? Any Problems?

In short, after a few false-starts getting our heads around the intent of the Statement of Work document, it went — and continues to go — very well. Projects we used to start and never finish are now completing and shipping. Communication within the team and with our users is better. And our throughput is up.

In fact, now that the progress and task lists are more visible to management and users alike, assignment and prioritization is also better. The Management Team is more aware of the complexities in projects — from the Statements of Work - and why they take so long — sometimes — to get done. We are also less likely to kill an ongoing, assigned piece of work, when the progress and involvement is clear. We also think a bit more and harder about what we really need to get done next instead of just assigning everything to everyone on a whim.

The Statement of Work has evolved into a thinking tool first, and a communication tool second. My team now uses the time writing the Statement of Work to think through the options, the details, the knowns and unknowns, the questions needed to be asked and answered. They are spending more and more time working the document up front instead of diving into coding and “bumping” into issues. Just the other day, one of the developers commented that the programming for a particular project would be easy now that the way forward was so clear.

I do also see our productivity going up. We may take more time up-front to write a document, but we are taking way less time when coding, testing and shipping as we’re not futzing around trying to figure things out. The total time to ship is dropping steadily as we become more habitual in thinking things through and writing them down clearly.

Our users also look these over. This leads to discussion, clarification, and the setting of expectations as to what will actually be shipped. It also leads to more work, but we track these add-ons as separate change requests or future projects. When we ship, our users are far more aware of what the changes are and how it impacts them.

The weekly review is also easier because, since the whole team reads all Statements of Work, we all know very well what each other team member is working on. For fun, I sometimes get team members to present each-other’s deliverables for the week, a task made easier by the process we follow.

Some things have not changed much. We still get a large number of interruptions, but my team is far more likely to triage the request and decide whether to accept the interruption and fix the issue, delay it until they get [out of the zone]https://hiltmonon.com/blog/2011/12/03/the-four-hour-rule/), or push it off as a future project to deal with later. We still get a large number of scope changes, and these too get triaged better. And we do get fewer priority changes, mostly because those that change the priorities see the work already done and are loathe to interrupt.

Of the issues faced, most have been resolved through practice.

Programmers would rather code that write documents. So the first few Statements of Work were a treated as a speed bump to get to coding up a solution, and necessary step to please the “old man”. After running through a few iterations, the benefits of doing the thinking, checking and discussions up front became quite clear. Writing is still a drag, but the benefits are now clear and there is more enthusiasm in writing and reviewing these Statements of Work within the team.

The other issue, the level of detail to be written, is also being resolved through practice. Initially they wrote very high-level Statements of Work, hoping to resolve assumptions and misunderstandings during coding — the old way. But as the early reviews by me and by users showed them, their readers were confused, identified missing components, pointed out areas not documented and therefore not thought about (or though through), and some were just plain wrong. The next iterations were more detailed, and the next more detailed in areas where details were needed. We’re still evolving where and when to dive deeper in a Statement of Work and where not to, but the documents are certainly getting better and the coding process way faster.

The result of the change to [Minimal Project Managementhttps://hiltmonmon.com/blog/2016/03/05/minimal-project-management/) is easy to see. More projects getting shipped correctly and quicker, with better discussion and problem solving up front and faster coding to the finish line. And our communications and prioritization processes run smoother.

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The Hiltmon

Hilton Lipschitz (@hiltmon) is CTO of an up and coming Hedge Fund, who loves to craft brilliant and delightful web, iPhone, iPad and Macintosh software products. Before this he was an independent software consultant, designer and developer at Noverse LLC.